The most striking thing about looking at
the bibliography of U.S. post-apocalyptic fiction seems to be also the most
banal. What catches the eye is that the number of volumes released during what
I’m calling the contemporary (2002 to 2013) phase of
post-apocalyptic fiction is greater than those released from
1946-2001. I’d like to briefly suggest that this detail doesn’t tell us as much
about the changing nature of our fears or our dreams as one might expect from a
spike in the production of stories about surviving the end of the world;
instead, I think this intensification reveals something about how cultural
production remains underpinned by the a logic of growth and can be explained,
in part, through what Chris Anderson has dubbed the long tail.[i]

That U.S. post-apocalyptic titles more than
doubled in the last decade is surely a sign that niche publishing has continued
the growth of markets for the book industry, even if those measures of growth
(1% in revenues) don’t match standards in other industries. The long tail, a
term discussed heavily in conversations about Amazon.com around marketing
smaller items to specialist audiences, proposes that it is better to have many
smaller scale products that interest a variety of different consumers than have
one or two mega commodities that everyone would buy. A prime example of this
are publishers like Permuted Press, which published post-apocalyptic and
zombie fiction, especially successful fan fiction, and whose slogan is “Enjoy
the Apocalypse.”[ii]

A broader cultural explanation for the
proliferation of post-apocalyptic fiction hinges on the increasing demand from
niche markets, on the one hand, and their correspondence with the direction of
marketing and publishing towards user-generated content, on the other. None of
this is meant to imply that there aren’t ideological explanations for the spike
in production of end of the world scenarios. Indeed, what I am trying to point
to here is that conditions seem perfect for precisely this type of writing. Put
another way, cultural production, rather than something like a collective
apocalyptic imagination, it seems, is a powerful place to start addressing the questions:
“why post-apocalyptic fiction” and “why now”?

I have separated this bibliography into
discrete periods based on perceptible shifts in form or style and historical
changes. For instance the long fifties
1946-1964 is the age of the bomb, with many titles bearing the impact and
anxieties of the nuclear age, while the rise of feminist and new wave sf 1965-1978 responds to generic shifts in science fiction and suggests a
correlation between post-apocalyptic fiction and other genres. That the
contemporary moment contains the greatest number of titles and widest range of
concerns is undeniable. I hope that readers of Deletion find this bibliography useful, and I welcome feedback and
comments.

[ii] I haven’t included many
of their titles in this bibliography, but those interested should visit: http://permutedpress.com/.

[iii] The long fifties is a term for a period taken from Keith M Booker's
excellent book: Monsters, Mushroom
Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction in Novel and Film, 1946-1964
(Westport: Greenwood P, 2001).

[iv]The long nineties is a term for a
period taken from Phillip Wegner's excellent book:Life between
Two Deaths 1989-2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties (Durham: Duke UP, 2009).